Saving Albatross Chicks From Tsunamis and Rising Seas | National Geographic

The Laysan albatross chicks that we're raising, they have a lot of personality. When you first look at them, you wouldn't realize how much variation there is among different birds, but there really is. A feisty one, aren't you? Yeah, he's got lots of energy. Be like him. Five is next.

Oh, hey buddy! This one is a... I know, buddy! You'll be pretty when you grow up, I promise.

There are more than a million of them worldwide, but about 98% of them nest in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, most of which have a maximum elevation of about two or three meters. In 2011, the tsunami from Japan wiped out tens of thousands of nests, and even before that, in the same year, there was a high wave event that wiped out tens of thousands more. Most people are not aware of that, and that's expected to happen with increasing frequency. The islands that most Laysan albatrosses nest on may not be here that much longer.

One way to combat that is to try to create new colonies on higher islands. We're trying to create a new colony on the North Shore of Oahu by moving eggs from Kauai, where they come from a military base where they nest next to an active runway, and they're an airstrike hazard with the aircraft. So, we take those eggs, move them to Oahu, we place them temporarily in foster nests, and then once the chicks hatch, we move them to the refuge and raise them by hand for five months.

But the hope is that they will then imprint on that site, and then when they're adults themselves in a few years, return to that site and begin nesting there. It's gonna take a long time, but I like to think about the fact that ten, fifteen years from now, we'll have an albatross population based on what we're doing now. And I think that's really special because that's gonna be a population that's well above sea level rise for a long time.

When we start losing the land on the northwestern islands, we're doing something now or getting ahead of the game. A lot of conservation work has to be reactionary in nature; people identify a problem or a threat and try to do something about it, and that's understandable. In most cases, that's required. But there are some threats that we know about already. We know it's going to be a problem, and I think it's important to try to be proactive about trying to address some of these threats before it's an emergency.

People come in from the five boroughs, they come in with a bird in hand, and they've gone to a great deal of trouble to find us. Would they take off half the day to rescue this bird?